Dan Gainor

Dan Gainor is The Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow and Vice President for Business and Culture for the Media Research Center

Dan Gainor, The Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow and Vice President for Business and Culture for the Media Research Center, is a veteran editor with two decades’ experience in print and online media. He has served as an editor at several newspapers including The Washington Times and The Baltimore News-American. Mr. Gainor also has extensive experience in online publishing – holding the position of managing editor for CQ.com, the Web site of Congressional Quarterly, and executive editor for ChangeWave, published by Phillips International. He has worked in financial publishing in his last two positions, launching new services for ChangeWave and Agora Inc. Mr. Gainor holds an MBA from the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business and a master’s in publications design from the University of Baltimore. As an undergraduate, he majored in political science and history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Mr. Gainor volunteers as a media and issues speaker with the Close-Up Foundation.

Latest from Dan Gainor

So much for Twitter being the “free speech wing of the free speech party.” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey couldn’t have distanced himself further from that famous 2012 quote. He told a “Wired 25” audience Tuesday that the original quote “was a joke.”

In 2012, then-Twitter UK General Manager Tony Wang told a media summit that the company tried to be “neutral” because of its principles. "Generally, we remain neutral as to the content because our general counsel and CEO like to say that we are the free speech wing of the free speech party," he explained.

Facebook claims it was besieged by a glitch that unintentionally marked posts as spam, fueling outrage that Facebook is allegedly engaging in politically based censorship. The incident follows several high-profile problems highlighted by site critics, especially on the right.

A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed the site partners with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to help police hate speech on its site. The spokesperson added that Facebook has its own definition of hate that differs from the SPLC’s.

Conservatives have good reason to be worried about Facebook. Newly published information about the site’s Community Standards, which guide what content is allowed and what is prohibited, shows it has vague restrictions on what it deems to be “hate speech” and “hate organizations.” It also discusses how the site will handle “false news” and raises concerns about the groups that it partners with.

But the hate speech guidelines are the big issue. Facebook has designated “protected characteristics” including: “race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disability or disease.” It also includes “some protections for immigration status.”

Like it or not, social media is the communication form of the future — not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Just Facebook and Twitter combined reach 1.8 billion people. More than two-thirds of all Americans (68 percent) use Facebook. YouTube is pushing out TV as the most popular place to watch video. Google is the No. 1 search engine in both the U.S. and the world.

War is being declared on the conservative movement in this space and conservatives are losing — badly. If the right is silenced, billions of people will be cut off from conservative ideas and conservative media.

It’s the new battleground of media bias. But it’s worse. That bias is not a war of ideas. It’s a war against ideas. It’s a clear effort to censor the conservative worldview from the public conversation.

Who among you hasn’t longed to watch the alt-left beat itself to a bloody pulp? Come on, raise your hand. You know you want to.

Thanks to folks at equally alt-lefty Vice, we get to watch the spectacle. Welcome to “Femme Feral, a feminist fight club that combines protest, performance, and noise punk to ear-splitting, rib-cracking effect.” Sounds promising. (And the photo is directly from the video.)

I take freedom of religion seriously. You should, too. The alt-left wants nothing better than to start using religious freedom against the right. It’s part of their campaign against Christians in the U.S. I know, some alt-left idiot is about to read about this and pretend Christians are mistreated in the U.S. like they are in the Mideast.

They aren’t. Even the Obama administration admitted Christians are being genocided in the Mideast. Things aren’t anywhere near as bad here. But in a free society built on freedom of religion, the attacks on Christian faith are worrisome.

America is an evil empire. It’s troops are “fascists in uniform,” with every one of them a “war criminal.” That bit of anti-American propaganda comes via the Antifa site ItsGoingDown -- the alt-left folks who can’t afford an apostrophe.

I had thought the Antifa scum had calmed down after news reports that government was treating them like domestic terrorists. Or, if nothing else, I figured they had gone to ground or under it. This is the first truly demented piece I’ve seen on IGD in some time.

Headlined: “On Yellow Ribbons and Counter-Insurgency: From a Veteran,” it purports to tell a veteran’s view of why America is evil. Certainly, we’ve seen anti-American veterans before. Remember when John Kerry claimed to have tossed his medals?

In these days of woke Hollywood, even famous people dare not outdo women. If they do, they receive the wrath of 1,000 think pieces about how poorly women are treated in Tinseltown. Yep, Hollywood is racist and sexist and discriminates against conservatives. The media are upset by two of those. I bet you can guess which ones. But Wahlberg (nee Marky Mark) is being reviled because he did something smart. And because he’s conservative.

The beauty of writing this column is that I’m almost beyond being shocked. The alt-left has successfully blurred the line between crazy (cray-cray for you younger folks) and conventional. So I wasn’t even especially shocked when I read this: “Fed Up With Mortal Men, Women Are Having Sex with Ghosts.” It’s not even a funny/punny headline. There’s no “ghost of a chance” comment deployed. No “give up the ghost” or “smells like teen spirit.” (The image comes from a Colbert Report story on ghosts allegedly having sex with each other, but the graphic was funny, so here it is. You try and find a ghost sex image.)

Welcome to one of the holidays liberals hate the most -- Thanksgiving. When the alt-left isn’t hating on Christopher Columbus, bashing Christmas, disrespecting veterans or undermining the national anthem, they find time to target a national day when we give thanks. And when they hate, boy do they hate. This year’s target? The Pilgrims.

If Paul McCartney and Wings want to record another album, they should call it, Ban On The Run. It could be the Splinter theme song, appropriate since this is “Ban Week” on that crazy, alt-lefty site. Ban Week gives the Splinter staff a chance to opine (say dumb garbage) about everything from cologne to zoos. If you didn’t think liberals hated everything before, you will now. Even more disturbing is how many facets of life they want to get rid of -- even aging parents. It’s not funny. It’s just bizarre. Logan’s Run beat Splinter to the punch by about 40 years -- depicting the murder of anyone over a certain age and government raising our kids, too.

It’s amazing how far we’ve fallen as a nation in less than 40 years when The Village People had a hit singing about being macho to now where the alt-left thinks it’s awful. And although the song is a bit sarcastic, it was embraced as a fun pop song to the point where even Donald Duck performed it.

Halloween might be over, but its impact is still being felt. I’m not talking about our added pounds from leftover candy. (In my case, every single piece as trick-or-treaters avoided my tiny cul de sac.) I’m talking about what the holiday revealed. In the case of Ezra Klein’s Vox (Motto: We write boring think pieces liberals can then pretend to read.) showed just how correct I was with last week’s column showing the connection between the left and the occult. Just days later, Vox writes this, “Take religion. Remove God. Add #resistance. Meet the Satanic Temple.”

Are you a good witch or a bad witch? Answer yes either way and that might make you an alt-leftie. Marketwatch just ran an interesting piece headlined, “Why millennials are ditching religion for witchcraft and astrology.” It didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t know. Young people are embracing the occult faster than you can spell it.

I have a hate/hate relationship with BuzzFeed. On one hand, I think it posts a lot of useless garbage that I almost never find even the slightest bit interesting. On the other, it also produces strongly biased pseudo journalism, yet gets credentialed by the media because it’s left-wing. You’ll see BuzzFeed staff all over cable and quoted like it’s a respectable journalistic entity.

One of the reasons we call liberals the alt-left is their opposition to anything traditional or normal -- like free speech, patriotism or marriage. Marriage has been a particular target of the left for many years. Forget the campaign for gay marriage. The left hates the institution, but it’s easier to wreck it from within than without. As The Establishment puts it, “marriage sits at the red-hot heart of our, ahem, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.”

Liberals who can’t win at the ballot box, turn to lawyers to push their agenda. And guns are no exception. The alt-left has always been the Sue Tribe, they’ve just gotten worse over time.

In the aftermath of the horrendous shooting in Las Vegas, the left has turned to an old standby, gun control. Only gone is their facade about guns. Now they want to take them, ban them or sue to shut down the companies that make them.

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